EXACTLY 11 years after the birth control pill was officially approved in the USA, 47 members of the newly-formed Irish Women’s Liberation Movement travelled by train to Belfast.They went to buy contraceptives, then illegal in the Republic, and then famously returned to Dublin, openly displaying their illegal goods.
The ‘Pill Train’, as it came to be known, is now part of Ireland’s social history, and the symbolic protest by the women on 22 May 1971 helped to energise a campaign for the introduction of family planning legislation here.
However, it would take another eight years before the government would introduce a very restrictive reform.
It was on 9 May 1960 that the Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to the pill in the USA. So this month marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most momentous inventions of the 20th century.
In fact, back in 1999, the Economist magazine named it the most important scientific advance of the 20th century.
Of course, its appearance back then sharply divided opinion, and those divisions continue to this very day.
Nancy Gibbs, the executive editor of Time magazine, put it very well when she said the approval of the pill 50 years ago “rearranged the furniture of human relations in ways that we’ve argued about ever since”.
According to the official teaching of the Catholic Church, the use of the pill or any other contraceptive is still “morally illicit”.
To say that this precept is honoured more in the breach than the observance is an understatement, yet the Vatican persists with its anti-contraceptive stance.
Edward Stourton of the BBC, in a recent book on the Church, has highlighted the effect of a change of policy on this matter by the Vatican.
“A change in the ruling on contraception would bring millions of Catholics back into full communion with the Church, and destroy at a stroke the principal source of the gap between teaching and practice that has had such a corrosive impact on the Church’s place in the daily lives of modern Catholics.”
That gap to which Stourton refers, and its enduring corrosive effects, date from the publication on 25 July 1968 of Humanae Vitae, the anti-contraceptive encyclical written by Pope Paul VI. Yet this widely-ignored teaching continues to be promulgated by Pope Benedict XVI, just as it was by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
Whoever would have thought that an item no bigger than an aspirin tablet would have caused such moral, social and even political convulsions? Yet this is precisely the effect the invention of the birth control pill has had.
The pill changed life for millions of women, though it must be said that these were women within the developed world.
Even in this sphere, the adoption of the pill and other forms of contraception has been uneven and in the Third World (despite the AIDs epidemic) there is still the anomaly that those who need contraceptives most are least likely to get them.
The pill’s greatest achievement is that it has freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancies, allowing them to assume roles as equals in politics, at work and in the home.
This is the chief reason why May 1960 is now regarded as a truly revolutionary date in the calendar of women’s liberation.
The debate and disputes about the Pill go to the core of the women’s liberation movement (later rebranded as feminism).
This undoubtedly means that one of the things the 20th century will be remembered for is the separation of sex from reproduction.
A long-established taboo was finally broken.
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